


Song of Sway Lake

by lapoesieestdanslarue



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: 1930s, Endgame Fix-It, M/M, OBVIOUS spoilers for endgame, Post-Serum Steve Rogers, Pre-Serum Steve Rogers, Steve and Bucky and jazzzzz baby!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-04
Updated: 2019-05-04
Packaged: 2020-02-23 19:27:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,038
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18708478
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lapoesieestdanslarue/pseuds/lapoesieestdanslarue
Summary: One of the first things that ever returns to him, one of the only memories he actually wants tokeepin those early days, is a melody. A line from a song--oh but doesn’t she recall the songs on the lake--A voice. “I’d freeze time for you.”Another, asking “Can we dance to it?”





	Song of Sway Lake

**Author's Note:**

> Regrettably un-beta’d

One of the first things that ever returns to him, one of the only memories he actually wants to _keep_ in those early days, is a melody. A line from a song-- _oh but doesn’t she recall the songs on the lake--_

A voice. “I’d freeze time for you.”

Another, asking “Can we dance to it?”

 

~*~

 

When Steve and Bucky were only fourteen years old, the Sisters of Mercy Convent and the Christian Brothers School pooled what little money they could get from the parish, and brought the sixth grade boys and girls on a trip upstate, to a lazy little lakeshore town with cabins by the waterfront and a jetty. 

Looking back on it now, he thinks he knows why they did it, why his parents were so insistent he go, why even Sarah Rogers let Steve go, with all his allergies and ailments. They were just children then, in that summer of ‘29, only eleven years old and safe from the harsh realities that awaited them. That trip marked the beginning of the end; soon after their return the crash would hit, fathers would lose jobs, mothers would be forced to work overtime, and those children would be plucked out of school and sent to the docks or the scrap yard or wherever would take them and give them a buck. It was at once so far and so close to them. But Bucky hasn’t forgotten the lightness it brought, the freedom, the city on a hill it created for him; a beacon of light and nostalgia towards which he would constantly work towards returning, and never quite could. Life, war. They got in the way after ‘29, in the way of dreams and plans and how things were meant to have gone. 

It was just summer; the May air barely beginning its descent into unbearable warmth and humidity. Back then, though, the breeze from the lake had been just right, cooling them down from the sun’s hot shine. 

Steve, especially had been beside himself; Bucky had never seen him more excited, not even when he won fancy charcoal pencils in an art competition run by the school. He’d never been outside of Brooklyn before, except for the few and far between ventures into Manhattan when his mother desperately needed something. Bucky, however, was no stranger to plains beyond the five boroughs. About once a summer, when his mother needed “some peace and goddamn quiet” he and his sister were bundled onto a train and sent to their Grandparents farm in Idaho. Steve would be beside himself before Bucky left, and Bucky always left with a heavy heart that never quite let up until he was back in Brooklyn, back to Steve, where every detail would be squeezed out of him for days after, even though Steve had heard it all before, and would hear it again when the same time rolled around next year. 

When they embarked on this trip, Bucky and Steve went glued together, with Bucky determined that Steve would get the most out of this trip, and Steve’s mind already captured by the green hills and crystal-clear water, vowing they would return. 

They were dirt poor bastards, the likes of which that town had never seen, and most likely would never see again. Bucky knew, just from the eyes that watched them as they poured out from their cabins, that they were novelties, and not meant to ever be permanent fixtures in the little paradise they’d built. They were worlds away from each other, and the disparity had never felt bigger. 

Steve, he knows, had felt it too. Bucky could see it in the way his shoulders tightened and he self-consciously patted his hair down when strolling families passed them. 

Their three days had passed in a blur, but what Bucky remembers most is the nice rich couple that had passed them by in their small boat as Steve and Bucky played around in the water. Something about them, their cries of laughter, maybe their blue eyes and crooked teeth had compelled this couple to take pity on them. They brought them on board, over to the other side of the lake and gave them soda floats and let them listen to their records. He still remembers her blonde hair and red lipstick, the way she’d offered them a coke like it was nothing, like it wasn’t _gold dust_ , and when Steve asked her to play that song again, the way her laugh had been delicate like money, and she’d pinched his cheek and called him a darling. He remembers watching the wife and the husband, and how they’d moved around each other so casually, touching and caressing so easily, like it didn’t mean anything, or like it meant _everything_ : a special privilege only they had, to touch without limits. They way they drank champagne, and how they danced just because they could, and how even though it got lipstick on his cheek the husband begged her for one more kiss. 

They spent an hour, maybe an hour and a half there tops, but it cemented in them a desire for something more; domesticity, a life, a dancehall of a life where the record never stopped spinning and Bucky’s hand never had to leave Steve’s. 

They walked home that night, and before they entered the cabin, they looked at one another. It was a silent vow, an unspoken promise, but it meant the world. And Bucky knew he’d live until his dying day trying to give it to Steve. 

 

~*~

 

The only true way to measure love is loss: that’s what his mother said. That’s what God’s will was, and it made us human, and good Catholic boys accepted their loss and thanked God for it. Our father, my God, hallowed be thy name. 

Bucky knows loss. Knows loss so well his heart could give out. 

But he was never so sure when she said that; said it so much she sounded like a broken record. He thinks, now, maybe it was just what got her through the loss of her husband, his father, and preparing herself for the loss of her only son. He can’t begrudge it, he just can’t agree to it and reconcile himself to that brand of philosophy. 

Sometimes, it feels like all he’s ever done since his return from Lake George in 1929 in lose. He lost any direction he’d thought his life would go when the crash hit and he was forced to work in the docks, and then again when he was booted to Germany to fight in a war he never asked for but was morally obliged to fight in-- the worst kind of bitter pride. Along the way he nearly lost himself-- but not quite. Never more than Steve could pull back for him. 

And Steve. Steve and Bucky, who have lost each other more times than they count and seem to be stuck on that godforsaken train. Two hands reaching, barely brushing-- and just loosing. One always losing the other by forces that conspire against them, a God who might hate them. 

And always, for others. It’s a price they are indebted to, the greater good. 

“How long will this take?” Sam asks. 

“For us, five seconds, for him, as long as he needs,” Bruce explains. 

Bucky knows, without needing to be told, that regardless of what happens Steve is not going to be the same. He’d seen it, after the battle against Thanos, how heavy his eyes had been, how hard it was for him to breathe. The fight in him that Bucky fell in love with at six years old was slowly being stomped out-- and if that didn’t make Bucky want to fight the whole goddamn world. Bucky would curse in the face of every God, saint or savior, if it meant Steve caught a damn break. 

Bucky begged Steve not to go back. 

Steve begged Bucky to understand. 

(Bucky begged Steve to stop enlisting, Steve begged Bucky to see that he had no right not to fight like all the other men. Bucky begged Steve to stop and let him go, Steve begged Bucky to stay with him ‘till the end of the line. 

Two hands, reaching, barely missing, stuck in a loop.)

Bucky told him if he wanted to go back to her, he’d understand. Steve had nearly hit him upside the head and asked him if he still had some of that dust stuck in his head because he clearly wasn’t _thinking_ straight. So Bucky had asked him where he would go, then, if he went back. Steve got a wistful smile on his face, and asked Bucky if he remember that sixth-grade trip they took to Lake George in the summer of 1929. Bucky said of course. Steve said he’d go back and build them a house there, exactly like the ones Bucky used to go gap-jawed over in the magazines, twenty times the size of their Flatbush apartment. 

It had been a nice moment, for a second they were old pals finally out of the frontline and having a well-earned laugh. But then it died down, and they were forced to remember that it wasn’t quite over yet, and it might never be. 

Steve and Sam clap each other on the back, and Sam finishes saying his well wishes. Then, Steve makes his way over to Bucky. He grips his shoulder, right where flesh meets metal, but that’s never seemed to bother Steve as much as it should. The pressure of Steve’s hand is comforting, but he doesn’t miss the unsteady exhalation from Steve’s mouth, the way he squeezes, using Bucky as an anchor, a grip on a reality that constantly evades them and pulls the rug out from under their feet. 

Bucky tries to be a sport about it, but he knows it fails when his smile is crooked and the wry chuckle he lets out tastes bitter. “What a modern fuckin’ tragedy we turned out to be, hm?”

Steve looks like he could cry-- he might. Bucky prays that he won’t because if he does then Bucky will and then he’ll grab Steve so tight he’ll never let him go, the greater good be damned. 

“I’ll come back,” Steve whispers quietly as he pulls him in for a hug. “I promise.”

They allow themselves just a few seconds to embrace, to breath in tandem as their chests rise and fall in the perfect synchronicity they’ve never had to practice. 

“Don’t do anything stupid until I get back.” Bucky can’t help but smile, if only their eleven-year old-selves could see them now. 

“How can I?” He rebukes, easy as breathing. “You’re taking all the stupid with you.”

It’s what they do, it’s how they’ve always dealt with it, the product of having existed in a time when their words and feelings were never made to see the light of day. Those confessions and admissions were for the four walls the surrounded themselves in it, and nowhere else. Not yet, not quite. 

Steve looks at him, and Steve knows. He’d never felt the worry or pressure of Steve never knowing how much he loved him, or what he’d do for him, because anything Bucky could ever think or feel-- Steve already knew, because Steve knew Bucky, from bone to body and marrow to skin. 

He pulls back, and Bucky already misses the weight of him.

Bruce starts counting down, and Steve’s eyes never leave his. He nods.

“Slán.”

 _Slán_ is Irish for goodbye, but it’s much more than that. _Slán_ is one of the first things Steve ever teaches Bucky, when they’re seven years old and he first meets Sarah Rogers and he’s entranced by the foreign fluidity with which they speak a language that Bucky is so far removed from, that his ancestors forgot in 1847 when they made it on a boat to New York, but Sarah Rogers keeps it alive and beautiful in tongue and soul. It sounded clunky and awkward when he first said it, repeating after them, and Steve had giggled and said it again and again until Bucky said it right. But Steve had this ability to make it sound like magic that Bucky never did. 

_Slán_ was said by strangers on a street when they knocked into one another, by lovers between fleeting meetings, for parents to children and friends to families. It softened the eternal burden that came with leaving, easing the ever-present strain of absence. An acknowledgment of the present, a nod to the unknowable future, and the weight we all carry from the past. When their ancestors had left home, and never saw their family or home again, with desperate hopes of making them anew on foreign soil, _slán_ was what they left with. When a soul passed on, _slán_ is what they said. When a daughter or son left for married life, _slán_ is how they celebrated. _Slán_ brought hope, and solace, and comfort. It joy while understanding the pain. Above all, it imbued strength to love, to be loved, and most importantly, to let go. 

Steve let him go, once. Perhaps the reason the wound sits so uneasy on him is how unused he is to it. But Bucky’s an old hand at letting Steve go. To measure his love for Steve through the times they’ve lost each other? What an injustice it does to the in-between of it all.

 

~*~

 

The winter that Steve was really, desperately sick, was the winter following his mother’s death in 1938. Just twenty years old and suddenly alone in his battle to keep Steve afloat, every waking moment Bucky was threatened by the constant water above his head, and the weight that at any moment he could drown from it. But it never hurt more than it matters, it never cost more than his love for Steve. 

He’d been walking home from the docks, muscles sore and stiff, with a few extra bucks in his pocket from the foreman that looked at him with pitying eyes. Pride, he had quickly learned, only gets you so far. And while Steve would never dream of it, Bucky had been quick to learn that a bit of pity got you miles further than a chip on your shoulder. Walking through Sheepshead Bay, mentally toting up how much it might cost to treat them to a soda, or maybe some ice-cream for Steve’s throat--

And then he’d heard it. 

A song he hadn’t heard in nearly nine years, that still sounded like money and clinking glasses and the push and pull of the tide against the shore.

_Oh Sway Lake, can she hear, alone, crying out in the ghostly moon-light? In Swa-ay Lake, can she see? That bird is just like me, lone-ly to-night. Oh but doesn’t she remember…_

Five dollars lighter, he’d waltzed home that night, straight into the bedroom where Steve lay, a thin sheen of sweat on his forehead, predicting the fever that was about to break. Bucky knelt down on his hunkers, and softly shook Steve awake. “Stevie,” he whispered. “Wake up.”

“W’ssit?” Steve mumbled, groggy from the fever and medicine, and the dream state that lingered on. 

“I got a present for you.” Bucky could hardly contain himself, and Steve raised an eyebrow at his mad grin.

“Oh yeah?”

Wordlessly, Bucky holds up the record, straight off the shelf. Steve smiles, but Bucky can tell it's polite and unremembering, and that he’s trying not to wonder why Bucky would waste so much money on a damn record. 

“Don’t get mad yet,” Bucky says, dusting a kiss to his cheekbone. “Wait.”

He comes back from the kitchen with their shitty phonograph and slides the record into place. Just before he drops the needle, he turns to Steve. “I’d freeze time for you.” 

With that, he watches as Steve’s eyes spark in recognition as the sweet melody fills the room, life finally beginning to spark in those sick eyes. He struggles up, and Bucky watches as his face cracks into a grin wide as a jack-o-lantern. 

“Can we dance to it?”

And they had; all night long.

 

~*~

Five seconds stretches into five lifetimes as Bruce counts down, and Bucky feels sick to his stomach. 

“-- One.”

“Where is he?” Sam demands.

“I don’t know, I--”

The momentary, heart-suspending panic Bucky had been feeling subdues as out of the corner of his eye he catches a familiar silhouette. Wordlessly, he makes his way down to the lakeside, leaving Sam and Bruce engulfed in their argument. 

He approaches the bench slowly, hesitating. He throat is unbearably tight as he asks “Steve?”

Steven Grant Rogers, back from the dead, from the ice-- from the past and the goddamn future-- turns around, and he smiles and--

Bucky could cry. 

He’s slightly older than he was, but just barely. The beard is back, his hair is slightly longer and if you were to look closely you would see the very beginning of crow’s feet beginning around his eyes. Steve Rogers should be nearly one hundred years old, and he doesn’t look a day over thirty-one. 

“Hey, Buck,” he says softly. He pats the empty space beside him, beckoning for Bucky to join. A gold band glistens on his left wedding finger.

Bucky can’t take his eyes off it, even with Steve’s gaze on him.

“Was it nice?” Bucky asks. 

He can hear the smile in Steve’s voice as he fiddles with it. “It was wonderful.” He twists it once, and then it slides off his finger, and he’s placing it into Bucky’s hand. 

Bucky turns it over between his fingers, awed. “Did we get that house in Prospect Park like you always wanted?” 

“For a while. Then we went to Lake George. Just like I promised.”

Bucky’s eyebrows jolt up. “Oh?”

“Yeah. But you suggested it. We’d had enough of noise. It was time for peace and quiet. And dancing, and carelessness.” Steve is quiet. “I didn’t realise..... I thought. I thought I would come back the same. I thought it was like _Tír Na nÓg_. That’s why I stayed so long.” He runs a hand through his slightly greying hair. “I guess not.”

Bucky smiles, with tears in his eyes, and kisses him on the cheek. “Don’t you worry about that doll.”

“I’m real sorry, Buck. I didn’t— I _don’t_ want to leave you.”

“How long did you stay?” Bucky asks quietly. 

“Too long, and not long enough. I missed you, though. I missed you, as you are now.”

“Don’t you want to go back to him?”

Steve frowns at him. Bucky elaborates. 

“He’s not... sick. You saved him, right? You caught him. He had two normal arms. He remembered. He was Bucky, really.”

“Buck,” Steve says fiercely. “In every timeline, in every world— there was always you. Didn’t matter if you had short hair or long hair or a metal arm or-or purple skin. You were mine. My Bucky.” He laughs. “You don’t see it, do you? Look.” He points to the river, and when Bucky stares in He sees their fractured reflections. “What do you see?”

“... I see two idiots looking in the water.”

Steve nudges him in the side. “I’m serious. Look closer.”

Bucky does, concentrating. 

“Know what I see? I see the same man I’ve loved from the moment I met him when I six years old. I see your mother’s eyes and your father’s cowlick. The nose you and Rebecca shared. I see the lips that kissed me and knew me, that have the power to speak me into existence. You said my name, Bucky, in Budapest, and all of a sudden I was a kid in Brooklyn again. You have the same power now. But I also see the man that sent me on a wild goose chase through Europe. I see a man who fell from a train. I see a man who survived a near fall from a train. You’re— you’re so much, Buck. But you’re everything to me. In every iteration, that never changes.” 

Steve looks up at him, cautious. “I would have you only to lick the dirt from your boots if only you’d have me.” 

And he’s right, something happens, but Bucky almost becomes younger, and Steve becomes skinner. But they also become older, and more precisely in the present. They’re fixtures, stuck in this world with each other only, two men out of time. Bucky turns, and grips the back of Steve’s neck, swallowing back tears. “Of _course_ I would you idiot. Of course I would.”

They stay like that, foreheads pressed together, for a while. Until Steve speaks again, clearing his throat. “I couldn’t… I couldn’t save you.” His voice breaks. “I tried.”

“Steve--”

“No, listen. I think… I think I held myself back from loving you all this time because I felt so guilty for so long about what I did to you-- what I thought I did. I had this itch, all the time, in my hand, thinking about how I let you fall. If I had just reached further, been faster--” He stops, shaking his head. “But the strangest thing happened. I went back to that time, to that train raid and I…” Steve frowns, at a loss for words. “We got stuck in some kind of _loop._ It was some kind of weird dream, I couldn’t remember you fully, or why I was there, but I _knew_ you, and you knew me. And at the end of it… I knew.”

“Knew what?”

Steve looks up at him, with tears in his eyes. “I had to let you fall. I don’t understand it, I wish I did, but that’s how God, or the universe, or whoever, wants it.”

“It was never your fault, Steve. You don’t need that to tell you.”

Steve laughs wetly. “That’s what you said last time when I finally managed to find you and you got out.”

“Steve, baby, you can go back to him--”

“I don’t want him,” Steve interrupts. “I mean, I _do,_ but it was different. We were different. _I_ was different. There was less shared life experience.” Bucky chuckles brokenly. “I’m sorry I kept you waiting,” Steve confesses into the crook of Bucky’s neck. “I’m sorry I never said it.”

“You can make it up to me,” Bucky smiles, wiping tears away from Steve’s eyes. “It’s only the rest of our lives.”

“I did bring something back for you,” Steve says sheepishly, pulling something from a brown leather satchel. “To say sorry, and to say…”

Bucky’s breath catches in his throat and he takes the record reverently, the cover still the same, the bright yellow and blue letters proclaiming Ethan Gold’s _Song of Sway Lake._

“I’d freeze time for you,” Steve murmurs. 

Suddenly, Bucky’s eleven years old again in a summer house, on the best day of his life. The breeze from the lake ruffles the silk curtains, and he and Steve are full on oranges and ice cream and the immaculate feast of life they’d never been privy to before. The sights, the smells, and the sounds, all the same. How it all felt on his skin. On his nerves. On his bones. As he lifts his eyes up to Steve’s, he remembers that moment in all its fleeting glory because that’s all that’s left in the passing of time: their memories and the way they relive them. No matter how hard they clutch to them, no matter how hard they cling to them, there’s no way to translate them perfectly into the present, no way to relieve them in the way he had wanted. Not in the present, not in any tangible way. The notion of time, a stream we can only dip our toes in but not control. He doesn’t want time to freeze for them, not anymore. Not like he used to. They’ve been frozen for quite some while.

He takes one last minute to remember it -- when the sun was hot, the breeze was cool, the winter was tough and Steve was smaller, and the subtle crackle of the records didn’t stop them from dancing.

The record plays on.

“Can we dance to it?”

**Author's Note:**

> The loop Steve refers to briefly here is actually something I wrote about 15k words on, which you can read [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17522594) if you'd like. 
> 
> If you liked this, why not consider dropping me a comment or following me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/buchannanrogers)?


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